Post-Senate
After his short Senate stint, Graham entered the field of world politics and diplomacy. He served as a mediator at the United Nations as a representative to India and Pakistan in the Kashmir dispute, serving in this capacity from 1951 through 1967. He retired from U.N. service in 1967 at the age of 81 and returned to Chapel Hill, after his wife died.
Graham died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina aged 85. He is interred at the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. Some nine months after Graham's death, his former Senate seat went to a former aide to the late Willis Smith, Jesse Helms, who also became the first popularly elected Republican U.S. senator from North Carolina.
The student union building at UNC-Chapel Hill is named in Graham's honor, as is the Frank Porter Graham Elementary School in Chapel Hill, and the Frank Porter Graham Building on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Graham, along with Eleanor Roosevelt and Hubert Humphrey and other anticommunist liberals of the era, was affiliated with the liberal advocacy group, the Americans for Democratic Action.
The North Carolina chapter of the ACLU acknowledges people who work towards the promotion of civil liberties in the state with the Frank Porter Graham Award.
The baseball career of Graham's brother, Archibald Wright "Moonlight" Graham, was popularized in the W. P. Kinsella novel Shoeless Joe and the 1989 film it inspired, Field of Dreams.
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